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cold fjord writes "The Telegraph reports, 'GCHQ has received at least £100 million from the U.S. to help fund intelligence gathering, raising questions over American influence on the British agencies. ... It also emerged that the intelligence agency wants the ability to "exploit any phone, anywhere, any time" and that some staff have raised concerns over the "morality and ethics" of their operational work. ... The agency has faced claims it was handed intelligence on individuals from the US gained from the Prism programme that collected telephone and web records. However, it has been cleared of any wrongdoing or attempts to circumvent British law by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, as well as by Mr Hague. The payments from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) are detailed in GCHQ's annual "investment portfolios", leaked by Mr Snowden to The Guardian. The NSA paid GCHQ £22.9million in 2009, £39.9million in 2010 and £34.7million in 2011/12. ...Another £15.5million went towards redevelopment projects at GCHQ's site in Bude, Cornwall, which intercepts communications from the transatlantic cables that carry internet traffic. ... A Cabinet Office spokesman said: "In a 60-year alliance it is entirely unsurprising that there are joint projects in which resources and expertise are pooled, but the benefits flow in both directions."'"
dryriver also wrote in with news that several telecoms are collaborating with GHCQ (BT, Vodafone, and Verizon at least). From the article: "GCHQ has the ability to tap cables carrying both internet data and phone calls. By last year GCHQ was handling 600m 'telephone events' each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time. ... Documents seen by the Guardian suggest some telecoms companies allowed GCHQ to access cables which they did not themselves own or operate, but only operated a landing station for. Such practices could raise alarm among other cable providers who do not co-operate with GCHQ programmes that their facilities are being used by the intelligence agency."

Am I reading that right? It sounds like you want to feed starving children to other countries. Granted this will do a lot to feed others and to help take care of population growth, but how much sustenance can a starving child give? Really, we should start by eating the fat kids here in the U.S.

The monies spent on starving children may well come from central government funds and so be in competition with NSA funds also allocated by central government. I expect that in the existing climate of anti NSA feeling some may well make NSA funds a target for protesting groups. If both are needed then other funding will have to be cut.

To be fair to those US citizens I imagine it is hard to vote for someone who would not do this when it seems to be supported by both their political parties and their system, unlike most (any?) other modern democracy, has those two parties 'baked in' so setting up a third alternative is less of a viable alternative. A duopoly is really not much better than a monopoly.

Third? There are several other parties, they don't need set up. They just need equal media coverage and a chance to debate through the whole election process.This won't happen, of course because the Repubmocrat regime will threaten to ignore any media who gives fair coverage outside the Repubmocrat party.

There are at least fifty in the US, five of them (inc Rs and Ds) are on enough ballots to win the Presidency. There were six on my ballot last election. The trouble is, the corporates who own the media outlets don't want to have to invest the cash to bribe three more parties, so they simply refuse to mention them.

Someone you love smokes marijuana. Why do you vote for people who want your loved ones in prison? Why do you vote for war and more corporate power? Why do you vote against the principles of our Con

GHCQ - Nobody but a Brit or a spy would be acquainted with that acronym.

Hey McGrew, ever watch James Bond?:)

Seriously though, I agree with what your saying, we have the same problem in Oz on some issues (dope is a great example), right now we heading into a federal election, both major parties are competing with each other to see who can capture the xenophobe vote. Contrary to what some people think, the parties are not conspiring with each other. They are responding to what is (shamefully) a popular sentiment amoungst Aussie voters, that ugly sentiment is reflected by the

If enough of the voting American people saw the problem and agreed to vote for a third party, perhaps a third party whose only platform was to change the laws to allow non-republicrats easier access to power in future, then that would be it.

What I am about to say I say often on here:

When you vote for the lesser of two evils, you are still voting to increase evil.

Many people dont get it, and will try to rationalize the most common excuse. The sad thing is that such excuses are so trivially destroyed by the obvious: Even if it were true that voting a 3rd party is "wasting" your vote, that is still not as bad as voting to increase evil.

In the end there can be no excuse for willingly and knowingly voting to increase evil. Really. No excuse at all.

"Voting 3rd party is wasting your vote" is the official platform of both of the major parties. No surprise there.

This man is trying to rationalize the most common excuse. It is not rational to think that putting an evil person into office will decrease evil, yet here he is rationalizing that very idea to himself.

The largest third party got 1 percent of the last vote. How are you going to magically get the other 32 percent needed to make any difference at all? Especially when twice as many people voted libertarian as are registered libertarian. At one percent, the vote is already straining the bounds of membership.

Do a membership drive, get all third parties behind one candidate, get more than one percent of the vote committed, and maybe the smart people will vote that way.

You voted for evil. Either you think that it was the right things to do, or you think that it was wrong the wrong thing to do. It looks to me that deep down you know that it was the wrong thing to do, or else you wouldn't have tried so hard to re-state "voting 3rd party is wasting your vote" in such an obfuscated way.

The fact that the largest 3rd party got 1% of the vote (is it actually a fact? I wont even bother) holds no relevance to the actual f

Come back to the big boy table when you have something to show for yourself - we're fighting real battles here.

No, you're not. You're playing their game and fighting fake battles that they've set up to distract you. Palin and Romney act like caricatures the same way that Bush did because that appeals to a certain demographic. And here, because of your glorious victory over them, we have a president who defends the same warrantless domestic spying he previously decried and who maintains a hitlist of US citizens. Things are not better than before, and are arguably worse. Your victory was another victory for evil.

See?This man is trying to rationalize the most common excuse. It is not rational to think that putting an evil person into office will decrease evil, yet here he is rationalizing that very idea to himself.

Yea he is.... but I'm wondering if the electoral college would ever allow a third party to win... The only real reason we know anything about what's going on is because of the internet. Remember back when the leaks first came out how the major news outlets behavied? eh???? Honestly I'm getting a bad feeling like in 5 years we will all need a government ID to get online because of those evil hackers and neckbered pedophiles. Honestly we've always been at war with pedophiles.... to protect the children! Also

When you vote for the lesser of two evils, you are still voting to increase evil.

Forget it. You're trying to turn back the tides. Most Americans don't even like the 3rd party candidates. The majority of Americans think that Snowden should be tried and punished for his crimes. And you really are wasting your vote (reference Bush vs Gore in 2000, with a possible spoiler by Nader).

What would make much more sense than trying to get everybody on board to a 3rd party is to implement a preferential voting [wikipedia.org] system. I shouldn't be punished with Bush by voting for Nader.

When you vote for the lesser of two evils, you are still voting to increase evil.

Even if it were true that voting a 3rd party is "wasting" your vote, that is still not as bad as voting to increase evil.

So what happens when even the third party candidates are unacceptable? Ron Paul? Please. Whacky communists? No thanks. There are absolutely no candidates that I would vote for. Does that mean I should not vote for a president? Or, should I vote for the candidate, third party or not, that would do the least amount of harm?

They keep buying the two party system lie. The truth is; there is only one Repubmocrat party. Either wing will eventually enact the same bullshit ( with unimportant differences in opinion to keep up appearances, like gun rights, gay marriage, anything that distracts and polarizes the population) and whittle away at the proper, plain language of the Constitution. Even since the "New Deal" the Supreme Court has been loaded with supporting toadies to carry out the Repubmocrat Dictatorships goals.

If it is, it is a sickness inspired by fear mongering to sell this to the U.S. budget. Way over the line. They don't need new toys, they need counseling.

And the fear mongering continues.They've ordered the embassies closed all over the middle east, and warning American travelers to stay home for a month. Apparently the risk expires at the end of august. Terroristic must have gotten a hold of some explosives with short "best if used by" dates.

But hey, this justifies all the spying, right? We're all good, then? We can forget all this Snowden stuff, righr?

Yup, and the GCHQ gets all their intelligence on Brits from the NSA, GCSB, and CSEC (no, not Citadel Security, Communications Security Establishment Canada). And CSEC gets their Canadian intelligence from GCHQ, NSA, and GCSB, and GCSB gets their NZ intelligence from CSEC, GCHQ, NSA, and so on, and so forth.

A-a-and...the Slashdot "editors" are earning the scare quotes around their titles once again. The NSA has been all overs the new lately, and you'd pretty much have to be hiding under a barrel not to know what that stands for, yet the summary carefully explains what it means. But as for GCHQ? Nope. Nothing. After checking with Google, I was able to ascertain that it does not stand for Google Corporate HeadQuarters, which was my first guess. If I were a nice guy, I'd tell you what it does stand for, but that would be doing the "editors" jobs for them, and, unlike them, I'm not paid for this crap.:)

No, I haven't been following the story particularly obsessively. Haven't been following it particularly at all. I've seen plenty of political scandals over the decades, and this one really wasn't much of a surprise to me. I remember Hoover, and I'm pretty sure I've been on watchlists as various points in my life, considering some of the people I've associated with/worked with. I hoped the government wasn't this bad, but I'm not a bit surprised to find out they are. But I still don't feel a need to obsess ab

You aren't really paying much attention if this is the first time you've heard about GCHQ. [14 links to Guardian elided]

I know Americans can be dicks about what they expect everybody else to know about their country, but outside of the royal baby crap, most Americans don't follow UK news. They especially don't read the dominant liberal UK newspaper, even on Slashdot. I read Google News myself, which often includes links to The Guardian articles, and GCHQ hasn't come up once.

So my habit of reading no more than one out of every two articles on the topic (and actually, it's a lot less than that) has bitten me in the ass. Fine. Doesn't make Slashdot's "editors" look any more professional, does it?

I would say you've used a rather apt phrase. Snowden's mass of public revelations are available to all, to friend and foe alike to use as they will, including for evil purposes. We have yet to see whom, if anyone, will end up being buried.

Snowden's mass of public revelations are available to all [...] including for evil purposes.

Please, give me an example of evil use of the information he revealed.

The only thing that I can imagine is making ill-intended people aware they should protect their communications... but that affects only the stupid ones, and only if they don't want to get caught pos facto, e.g. Boston bombers.

The only thing that I can imagine is making ill-intended people aware they should protect their communications

That is exactly what is happening. This is following specific revelations from Snowden. It has been described as, 'really bad."

... but that affects only the stupid ones, and only if they don't want to get caught pos facto, e.g. Boston bombers.

No, it also enables them to engage in planning and execution of their attacks without being caught. Since some of those may very well be suicide attacks, as the 7/7 attacks were, getting caught is a moot point.

The purpose of training is to take the best ideas from a bunch well informed, smart people, and teach those behaviors and techniques to new people. That way they can act s

What kind of ill intentioned group is both smart enough to pull off an attack, and stupid enough to think the government isn't spying on everything? My Venn diagram the two circles in different zip codes.

Personally, I think we would be better off if we weren't antagonizing everyone. Instead, we're spending a fortune to make enemies, and we publicly mock politicians for having a foreign policy as "unamerican" as George Washington's.

The 4th amendment says that people have a right to be secure against unreasonable searches.

This simple prohibition has no context - the fact that someone else (a foreign government, a corporation, another citizen) gives the information to the government doesn't matter. It's still a violation, the fourth amendment makes no distinction for how the government gets the data.

The fact that the legislature passed a law saying that they can doesn't matter, and the fact that the executive branch says that they can doesn't matter either. The executive branch cannot and must not be the ones to judge the legality of their actions - that would be tyranny.

Determining whether something is legal is, and always has been, the purview of the judicial branch. In cases of ambiguity or differing interpretations, there is always the option of bringing it to the supreme court.

Many legal scholars count the government's actions as illegal, and a common-sense reading of the fourth amendment seems to agree.

I wish the people who keep repeating that the government hasn't broken any laws would shut up - they're giving tyranny a measure of respectability just by saying that. I also wish people who don't care about their own privacy would shut up - many people do care, and since you don't care there is nothing to be gained by arguing... or even voicing your position.

If you think what the government is doing is OK, please STFU and let people bring the issue to the supreme court. If you're correct, then it won't matter and you shouldn't object to raising the question. There's no honourable reason to argue against verification.

I think what he was driving at, is that in order for the NSA to get information it is barred from getting by the 4th, it farms that out to GB and is delighted when GCHQ gifts them that info. I'm sure the reverse is true as well. It's a scam basically, to undermine human rights.

Just like the 3d party doctrine in the US. You know, if out of necessity you share info with a 3d party, you somehow have absolutely no expectation of privacy. The SCOTUS has conflated "perfect impenetrable secrecy", with "expectation of privacy" and has thus eviscerated the 4th amendment. One slip up, one necessary transaction -- that's it, your privacy means shit. And of course, the Feds won't play by their own rules -- you know, they should have no expectation of privacy in the info Snowden leaked because they shared it with a third party (Booz Allen Hamilton). But to expect them to play by the rules us serfs have to live under... now that's unreasonable. Right? Right?

An important thing to point out, it is not just the government that broke the law, more importantly it is the political party and specific individual politicians who broke the law. This is all about politics and monitoring your politics and via that monitoring controlling politics (the corporate party).

This enables 'individual' politicians to take actions against citizens and their families when those citizens in any way threaten the power base of those 'individual' politicians. Effectively support a third party, find your self on a no fly list or even worse the let you fly but will they radiate and sexually assault you and your family every time you or they fly. Want a job, forget it, you are now considered a security threat and are only allowed access to minimum wage jobs. Any attempt to gain social welfare, you and your family are tagged as permanently requiring extended further investigation prior to any support being provided.

That's the kids stuff of course, the more serious is the bogus warrant and search based purely on circumstantial digital data. The swat soldier assault where you and your family are threatened at gun point, pets are shot, your family home is trashed and of course there is every chance you will not survive the event, all it's takes is one of those invaders to shout 'GUN' and, the rest will open fire, execute you and random members of your family. They will get off, because they felt threatened because someone shouted gun but of course no one will admit to it (maybe it was the neighbours TV).

Seriously people need to wake up to themselves because it is already that bad. This is the current reality and this is what is already happening.

This is all about politics and monitoring your politics and via that monitoring controlling politics (the corporate party). This enables 'individual' politicians to take actions against citizens and their families when those citizens in any way threaten the power base of those 'individual' politicians. Effectively support a third party, find your self on a no fly list or even worse the let you fly but will they radiate and sexually assault you and your family every time you or they fly. Want a job, forget it, you are now considered a security threat and are only allowed access to minimum wage jobs. Any attempt to gain social welfare, you and your family are tagged as permanently requiring extended further investigation prior to any support being provided. . . . This is the current reality and this is what is already happening.

You say this is already happening? That there are politicians in the US or UK that are using the intelligence services to target individual voters for supporting a third party candidate? That sounds like a stunning revelation you have there, especially since the intelligence agencies tend to be relatively isolated from most politicians. I'm a little surprised I haven't seen support for your dramatic revelation anywhere in the media. Can you point out where we can go for more information?

There were stories of politicians, union officials, political activist, all put on no fly lists, all subject to further investigation and border crossings. There have been countless stories of political activist being arrested where those arrests were called preventative against imagined potential criminal acts.

'NO', I Am Not Your Fucking Slave. You want those stories, you fucking look them up:P. They are readily available across the internet.

> You say this is already happening? That there are politicians in the US or UK that are using the intelligence services to target individual voters

Google Herbert Hoover. This year, we know the Obama administration used a federal agency, the IRS, to target citizens who disagree with him politically. Given that he's a) tracking all of your emails and phone calls while b) using federal agencies against voters, it seems quite likely he'd combine the two.

Good fucking lord - they didn't break the law, they made a law that (may be) in violation of the constitution. For a group of fukcing nerds who scream and yell about the misuse of theft vs infringement when it comes to copyright and patent law, you're quite the knuckehead when it comes to the feds knowing you surf porn all the time.

If we criminally prosecuted every congressman and senator who had a law striken or modified as unconstitutional by the court there would be none left. Perhaps yu would recommend

Yes the Constitution is the supreme law of the land in the US. As the Supreme Court said, a law violating the Constitution is null and void, without effect. If an act is made "legal" only by an unconstitutional "law", it is not made it legal at all, for that law is null and void. Acting under the color of a void law that contravenes the Constitution is acting illegally.perhaps an analogy to make it more clear. I hereby give you permission to break into your neighbor's house. If you go ahead and break into

No, it doesn't. Crime merely requires that you violate the law, even if you didn't know the law existed. But, hey, thanks for playing.

A law is enforceable and viable from the moment it is ratified and signed. A law may be rescinded if it is found to violate the constitution, even to reverse application of the law back to the date of signature, but until that happens it is the law.

Google "mens rea". It's a central concept of anglo-american law. The term we use today, mens rea, was first recorded by Augustine during the Roman empire.You might wonder how this relates to "ignorance of the law is no excuse". Suppose you con someone out of $1,000. You may not know that what you did is called "fraud by inducement", but you know that you screwed then over. That's the difference. The fact that you don't know exactly which law makes it illegal is no excuse. You did have guilty intent, c

If you think what the government is doing is OK, please STFU and let people bring the issue to the supreme court. If you're correct, then it won't matter and you shouldn't object to raising the question. There's no honourable reason to argue against verification.

Fuck no, I don't want this to go to the Supreme Court.99% of the time, SCOTUS defers to the Executive Branch when they claim National Security.

I'd much rather see this case tried in the court of public opinion,with our representatives in government

The 4th Amendment was written eons ago. The government will simply redefine the term. The surveillance society is not just a reality, but an inevitability given the direction and capabilities of the technology. This is just the beginning. Individuals need to account for their digital activities, and protect their identities, if that is important to them.

Between the two world wars the precursor to GCHQ, the Government Code & Cypher School, and various earlier organisations were tapped into international telegraph lines/carriers (e.g. in the UK and Malta) in order to obtain copies of diplomatic traffic. The British companies acquiesced to this with little coercion and the US companies took a little more convincing but eventually complied. There's nothing much new here, only the scale has changed.

I find it strange that this is a question that still need to be asked. Maybe that is because I'm living in Europe, but for years I have the feeling the American influence on Great Britain is big in everything. So big that I personally see the British politicians as some kind of American trojan horse within Europe.

Some europeans even joke that it isn't a country anymore, but the 51st state of the US. Really in all honesty, this article doesn't surprise me one bit.

British people ALSO joke that we are the 51st state. As a Europhile, I want us to have a good relation with the United States, but not at the expense of our relationship with the rest of Europe. (And Britain should have been in the full Schengen agreement years ago, but we're not to appease the Daily Mail reading little Englanders)

I created a crowdsourcing platform for science with the goal of never letting a worthy science project go unfunded. I have always loved science and technology and wish I was scientific minded, but have come to terms with the fact that this is the best way I can further humans scientific knowledge, which I am none the less excited about. ScitechStarter is not only useful for scientific project creators, but is also great for people like myself who are looking for a way to contribute and don't have the abilit

It has been known for some time that the various intelligence agencies of the Anglosphere cooperated on various projects. Common enemies make for common cause. The annual support doesn't appear to be that significant - equivalent to about 10-15% the cost of a Eurofighter Typhoon per year.

My goodness, so your justification of a hideous waste of money is to point to an even greater hideous waste of money?

You say that common enemies make for a common cause, but the truth is that the terrorist threat is so tiny as to barely exist. Only 52 people lost their lives in the 7/7 events that you point to, and you had to go back 8 years to find that many. Whilst tragic, the number of people dying from terrorism in western countries over the last 20 years is much, much less than those dying from any one of either the road toll, heart disease, or cancer over the same period. But the money allocated to defense keeps ballooning because department heads over-exaggerate the terrorist threat so that they can stampede politicians into letting them keep or expand their budget.

100 million pounds is significant because it is still over $US1 per taxpayer. Anyone who understands statistics or risk analysis can easily see how far the defense spend has grown beyond the point of diminishing returns. As far as I'm concerned, it is now actively causing the death of far more people than it saves, purely by virtue of the fact that the money could have been far better spent finding cures for diseases, building self-driving cars, or funding research into any number of technologies which would have actual societal benefits.

I know from your previous posts that you seem to think it is patriotic to support the actions of all the TLA organizations without question, but I disagree. In a democracy, it is of vital importance and far more patriotic to question this sort of rampant waste of taxpayer dollars.

Only 52 people lost their lives in the 7/7 events that you point to, and you had to go back 8 years to find that many.

People do not understand how tiny that is. It is a massive tragedy for those involved (as so many other deaths are), but what people refuse to accept is that by wasting money they are effectively causing far more death and tragedy because the money could be spent elsewhere.

But the scale is beyone minute. The best numbers I could get from the office of national statistics was a mortality rate of 1000 for men and 600 for women, per 100,000 in that year. In London alone the expected death rate on that day alonw was 219 people, so the terrorist attack was not even dominant in the city it happened in. In the UK overall the numberis more like 1315.

To reiterate, the terrorist attack accounted for 1/5 of the daily deaths in the city it happened in for that one day alone.

It's a tragedy, sure, but so are many other things.

Over twice as many cyclists have died in London in that time. If 1% of the London (never mine UK wide) terrorist budget had been diverted to something more sane, then actual measureable lives could easily have been saved.

It sounds to me like you didn't do a proper job of accounting for the actual risk. It appears that you didn't bother to gather lists of the planned or attempted attacks that were interrupted and develop estimates as to loss of life, limb, and property had they succeeded. You aren't properly accounting for the risk fi you don't. Those numbers are rather important since many of them would have been mass casualty events such as attacks on football stadiums that could have killed hundreds and wounded thousan

[...] the fact that successful terrorist campaigns will draw more recruits.

Citation needed. But regardless, do you know what is even more successful in drawing more terrorist recruits? Murdering hundreds of innocent people in drone attacks [which is itself a terrorist attack, however you try to justify.]

The relatives of all the hundreds of innocent people murdered in the strikes disagree, I presume. But you lack the empathy required for understanding that.

And to explain the situation in Pakistan, I'll give you an allegory. Imagine Rick Perry is the president of the USA, and extraterrestrial aliens invade and start bombing California. He says "yeah! kill them liberals, I mean, terrorists!!!". Btw, the aliens gave a lot of gold to Rick Perry.

The situation in Pakistan is that the government has limited control, if any, over the tribal areas. Al Qaida and the Taliban (both Afghan and Pakistani) have exploited this to set up shop there, often to the inconvenience to the locals. At times the locals themselves have attacked al Qaida members and the Taliban. The drone attacks focus on the terrorists, often while they are moving in vehicles. That tends to isolate them and means few other people are around. There are other methods of attack, and n

You seem to be missing quite a few planned attacks there. Also, I wouldn't look for the intelligence services to do much bragging. It isn't their way, they prefer to avoid their role being know when they can. That includes any assistance to the police doing the "bragging," and perhaps some of the happy "accidents" that have foiled some of the plots.

The last several heads of MI5 would seem to disagree with you about the risk. They think it is very high.

You seem to be missing quite a few planned attacks there. Also, I wouldn't look for the intelligence services to do much bragging. It isn't their way, they prefer to avoid their role being know when they can. That includes any assistance to the police doing the "bragging," and perhaps some of the happy "accidents" that have foiled some of the plots.

Testifying before the Senate on Wednesday, National Security Agency Deputy Director John Inglis conceded that the bulk collection of phone records of millions of Americans under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act has been key in stopping only one terror plot — not the dozens officials had previously said.

That's right, after all the fear-mongering and hype about risk, after all the billions of dollars, after the complete and ongoing invasion of privacy, the NSA's S.215 surveillance program stopped one plot. Maybe.

This is the NSA deputy director testifying in front of congress, not some internet loudmouth.

So tell me again how all that money wouldn't be better off spent on trying to cure cancer.

well they don't tend to deploy SAS unless there's a serious incident and its time for shooting and in the USA your so prissy about the armed forces doing things on home ground you end up with militarized police or (walts as the SAS or teh Seals would call them) see the recent armed "hot fuzz" style take down of those dangerous adult female university students who where suspected of buying *gasp* booze

mortality rate of 1000 for men and 600 for women, per 100,000... In London alone the expected death rate on that day alonw was 219 people...

It's a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. Every living person will die at some point. Comparing a single cause of death against all causes of death combined will result in a small number for most causes of death. In this case, you're comparing death rates for people who mostly had a long and healthy life behind them to a death cause that hit mostly people betwee

Snowden takes a leak in Russia, you get a fresh frosty piss for Obama. I hope he uses a coaster. I saw a picture of the bastard with his feet up on the historical oval office desk. His filthy damn shoes. GIVE THAT MAN A DRINK!